Following Gov. Mary Fallin’s announcement a few weeks ago that Oklahoma would accept more than $54 million in federal funds to begin implementation of a health insurance exchange, I blogged about the “concept” of health insurance exchanges as a useful idea (absent Congressional effort to change the federal tax code) in a pati...

"Conservatives should use their newly acquired power," law professor Andrew Spiropoulos writes today in The Journal Record, "to enact reforms that will both positively advance the cause of good government and diminish the power of selfish interest groups who have demonstrated their indifference to the needs of the community."...

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Last week Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed a bill that ended the privilege of collective bargaining for state employees. Governor Walker and lawmakers who supported the measure should be thanked for their courage.   Despite the doomsday warnings in Wisconsin, Oklahoma has found that even without collective bar...

Chris Jacobs, the tireless health policy analyst for the Republican Policy Committee, breaks down the staggering numbers associated with implementation of Obamacare to date.

Many people assume that Oklahoma cannot eliminate its personal income tax without raising other taxes. Many people, but not all people.  Economist Stephen Moore, an editorial board member of The Wall Street Journal, once suggested that Oklahoma phase out its income tax over 10 years, devoting growth revenue to these tax ...

Last Friday the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced the approval of another 126 waivers of various requirements included in the health care law, bringing the total number of waivers to well over 1,000. A full list of waivers is available here. Chris Jacobs of the Republican Policy Committee notes that the w...

The state Senate yesterday approved a joint resolution which would allow Oklahoma voters to approve an amendment prohibiting discrimination and preferential treatment in state government. Specifically, SJR 15 says: “The state shall not grant preferential treatment to, or discriminate against, any individual or group on the ba...

Gov. Mary Fallin and other legislative leaders recently announced their intention to accept more than $55 million dollars in grant funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to establish an insurance exchange in Oklahoma. To date, 48 states have accepted at least $1 million in federal funds to begin i...

When OCPA president Michael Carnuccio and I were at a Heritage Foundation meeting in April of 2010, more than once did we hear from Heritage analysts and others that Oklahoma was going to have a golden opportunity to enact conservative policies in 2011 (yes, even in April the handwriting was on the wall, shellacking-wise). We...

One is tempted to blog this week about the seven school systems, seven superintendents, and seven administrative staffs—in one Oklahoma town of fewer than 4,000 people. But that would just be too easy, now wouldn’t it?So let us turn our attention from common education to higher education. I have previously argued that policym...

There was an excellent column in The Oklahoman this week by Oklahoma’s labor commissioner, Mark Costello, on the topic of binding arbitration. He writes:According to 2009 U.S. Bureau of Labor data, average state and local government wages are 34 percent higher than those in the private sector, health benefits are 118 percent ...

A measure currently making its way through the Oklahoma Senate would authorize the state to enter into an “interstate compact” with other states to regulate health care without interference from the federal government.  The measure, Senate Bill 722 by state Sen. Clark Jolley, recently passed out of the Senate Rules Commi...

Last week in The Oklahoman, OCPA adjunct scholar Russell Jones, a marketing professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, took aim at the notion that “our economic difficulties would disappear if we hired more government workers.” To do so, Jones pointed out, “we'd have to take money from taxpayers and no new value would b...

The Cato Institute’s February 25 podcast urges governors of states which successfully challenged Obamacare in federal court to stop implementing the controversial healthcare law.  In the wake of U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson’s ruling that the law is unconstitutional, some governors, like Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Al...

In the first edition of Oklahoma Policy Blueprint (in a chapter entitled “Promoting Economic Development: Government Programs or Economic Freedom?”), economist Benjamin Powell made the case that “to promote real economic development, the state must change its policy focus from specific development programs to instead pro...

The state of Illinois recently raised its state income tax 66 percent and its corporate income tax nearly 40 percent, largely due to its pension funding crisis. Wisconsin, Indiana, New Jersey, Oregon, and many other states are also taking major steps to stop the grotesque overspending and debt accumulation that is due in larg...

“My goal is to make Florida the No. 1 business state in the nation,” writes Florida Gov. Rick Scott. “We will be the state for job creation. And the first step in that direction is to begin phasing out the business tax by reducing it from 5.5 percent down to 3 percent this year. Over the next seven years, we’ll phase it out c...

“The vehemence of the opposition to President Obama’s overhaul of health care has spawned an assortment of strategies for killing it,” Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes wrote recently. “The newest and most ambitious would create a health care compact among the states and use it to switch control of health care prog...

As of today, “seven states—Alaska, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Texas, and Virginia—have yet to sign on to the adoption of national academic standards and tests,” Heritage Foundation analyst Lindsey Burke points out in a new memorandum (‘National Education Standards and Tests: Big Expense, Little Value’). “They wou...